I woke up in a grump today.

I kept having these annoying dreams about Christmas decorations. It sounds stupid when I say it out loud, but it was really annoying at the time. You know if you’ve been really focussed on one thing all day, like spreadsheets, and then you dream in a weird Excel format?*

Well I had the same thing but with woven paper hearts. I kept making them, but something was wrong with them, and I would wake up feeling all twitchy about it. I’d lie back down, telling myself not to dream about any more decorations, but then there they’d be, all weird and papery in my head. It was quite frustrating.

Fortunately, Monday morning in netball morning. Netball works very well at clearing my head of anything other than scoring goals and trying not to run into people, and was just what I needed to rid my brains of paper chain nightmares. It was also rather fun as it was the first session after our Christmas night out on Friday, so we got to do all that ‘morning after the night before’ stuff – ‘Jo! How are you feeling! I loved it when you stood on that table and made that speech! What time did you leave the Tennis Club AGM after party?’

That sort of thing.

All the ingredients of a perfect netball Christmas party

All the ingredients of a perfect netball Christmas party

So, after an hour of charging around, getting so hot and sweaty I was steaming up my glasses, I felt much better, and was not at all intimidated by the paper hearts when I got back home.

One question though still remains from Friday night.

What do we call our team?

We play from a local primary school – Sefton Park – so on the table at the moment are things like Sefton Scorpions and Sefton Park Panthers, but we have yet to hit on a name that has made everyone go ‘YES! That’s it!’

This is where you come in. Do you have any suggestions for a netball team name that implies a blend of feminine strength and sharp shooting?

Leave your comments please…

*Please say this isn’t just me being MAD.

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Wondering what to do with your Saturday night?

Let me tell you about what I did last Saturday, and see if I can inspire you. My last Saturday night in was spent courtesy of Family Bargains. For those of you who don’t know, Family Bargains is like the big sister of 99p Stores, where not everything does cost 99p. It still has though, as the name suggests, bargains for all the family.

There are plenty of good brand names, as well as more unusual products you may not have heard of, but for our Saturday night in, we stocked up on some old favourites, (wine and chocolate obviously), and splashed out on a new board game:

"Family Bargains"

I just had a quick look on the Debenhams website, and the game on its own is still £15, even though it is half price at the moment. We got everything in this picture though – an entire evening of fun – for less than twenty quid. Now that’s what I call a Family Bargain.

(Don’t look too closely, otherwise you’ll see that I have already eaten all the cherry liqueurs all by myself.)

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Welcome to a week in tweets, my regular weekly round-up of the week in 140 characters or less. I say regular – regular apart from last week, when I forgot.

I’ve tweeted over the last few weeks as Belle, as Bee, and as Nancy Drew, girl detective, so I thought it was about time I stopped hiding behind other people and wrote about my own week for a change. This week I’m feeling bad about the amount of biscuits I’ve eaten and television I’ve watched, so I thought I’d do a bit of a confessional.

As always, it’s more of a retrospective than an absolute accurate-to-the-day factual record, so if you’d like to have a go yourself this week, and add your post to my linky, do feel free to exercise a bit of artistic licence.

Monday – Went to book group. Took wine and haribo as a gift. Couldn’t resist second slice of cake and glass of wine. #reallyshouldn’thavedonethat

Tuesday – Went to @theSteadyTable. Gave out free books to passers-by. Flirted with young boys in an effort to get them to read blog. #reallyshouldn’thavedonethat

Wednesday – My birthday! Got a lot of books and jam. Lay in bed reading when should have been working. #reallyshouldn’thavedonethat

Thursday – Got asked for ID to buy wine in Sainsbury’s. Pointed out I am now 34. Went home with lemonade. Wished I’d taken ID #reallyshouldhavedonethat

Friday – Tried to make my own jaffa cakes. Yelled at over-eager daughter for not spooning mixture accurately. #reallyshouldn’thavedonethat

Saturday – Went to local wholefood shop. Spent too much money on halva, dried figs and milk made of coconuts. #reallyshouldn’thavedonethat

Sunday – Took ungrateful children to indoor shopping centre in the rain. Tried to buy their co-operation in John Lewis creperie. #reallyshouldn’thavedonethat

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This morning a Boden catalogue arrived in the post.

Before I knew what was happening, I was idly flicking through it.

‘That dress is nice,’ I thought to myself, stopping on a page with a wholesome looking woman happily riding an old fashioned bike along a cobble street, ‘and looks like really good quality.’

I didn’t ask for the Boden catalogue, I don’t know how they found me, but this is clearly the beginning of the end. How long now before I’m wearing Hunter wellies for the school run and hankering after a Cath Kidston tea towel set? View Post

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A little while ago my friend Emma at Me the Man and the Baby tagged me in a post, asking me to open my fridge to the world. When she tagged me, I looked in my fridge, and just couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of what was basically cans of lager and some cheese. I have been waiting since then for the day when my fridge looked as clean and wholesome as Emma’s, but unfortunately that day has never come.

This is the outside of my fridge, covered in magnets, including the rather funky scrabble magnets that Belle bought me for my birthday this week. The top of my fridge is covered with all manner of junk, including my collection of ‘milk jugs in the shape of chickens where the milk comes out of their beaks’.

Fridge magnet collection

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In preparation for my first writing workshop this week over at Sleep is for the Weak, I am writing on the theme of false assumptions – those funny things that people think about you that seem to come from nowhere.

This is an interesting topic for me, as I’m pretty sure people are quite often not sure what to make of me. For a start, I’ve been told I look younger than I am – 32 this April – and the perception of youth can often effect the way people interact with you. A couple of years ago for example, a salesman came to the door, trying to flog gas and electricity. I answered, and he asked me if my mum or dad was home…

Age gives a woman a certain gravitas and I do often worry about not being taken seriously. Sometimes when I meet people for the first time I want to come right out and explain – “I may look young and have the voice of a child, but really I am a proper grown up who knows how to do stuff. Honest.”

Add to this the fact that I was pregnant at 16, when I looked about 12, and I’m fairly sure I must have attracted some curious glances in my time. Not that I have ever really been aware of it. I’m just me inside, and I forget sometimes that other people can see my face when they are talking to me.

Another occasion I remember well was when I got my GCSE results. I was particularly geeky at school, a straight A student and prize winner, and everyone I went to school with knew it. (I made sure of that – hence not having many friends at school…). My boyfriend at the time however went to a different school and when his friends – whom I had known for some months – found out my results they were stunned to say the least. “Blimey,” they said, “we’d thought you were pretty stupid!” Charming.

A couple of times in the last week people have made reference to me being terribly organised and orderly, an assumption which I challenged, not least because it made me feel terribly dull. Who wants to be thought of as ‘the woman whose files are arranged nicely’?

It’s true that I am fussy about some things – I do like my books to sit flush which the edge of the shelf, and have been known to arrange them in colour order – but I don’t think this makes me hugely organised. In fact, a quick glance around my study or bedroom would show quite the opposite. Piles of magazines, newspapers, unread letters and mountains of clean and dirty washing, merging together in one giant heap – hardly the hallmark of a neat freak.

And then of course there are the friends who see me scoffing sweets and quaffing wine like the grape is about to become extinct and assume I am some kind gluttonous lush with no self control. Oh hang on a minute…

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In my true fickle style, I have decided against the annual summary. As hilarious it might have been for others to read of my failings, my disastrous dates and my general parental incompetency, I am not convinced it would be a terribly positive activity.

I thought about it a lot last night in bed, by myself, reliving events from 2009, and, to be honest, the exercise didn’t do a lot for my self esteem. I was pleased to think that I had progressed from my seven year old sleeping in my bed every night to her only falling asleep there, but I’m still not sure that is a massive achievement. Are there many mothers who have to lug their quite grown up children across the landing every night before they can go to bed? Resolution for 2010 – convince Belle that her bed really isn’t such a bad place to be.

When you spend every evening on your own it is easy to become too reflective, to think over things you have said or done and wonder if they have somehow contributed to the aloneness. Should I have mentioned the naked dinner party photos on a first date? Did I eat with my elbows on the table? Was a bottle and a half of wine TOO much? Probably.

The truth is that none of these things should really matter in the grand scheme of things, and I shouldn’t be giving these thoughts any space in my head. Forcing myself to recollect every horrendous liaison is guaranteed to make me feel about 14 years old, plagued by irrational self doubt and loathing. I hated being 14 the first time – I don’t want to do it again.

Of course this is all classic procrastination. Post one – introductions, post two – this is what I’m going to write about, post three – no it isn’t actually after all…. Maybe at some point I will just get on with it.

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